Jill Bowie

Research

My research interests include English syntax and morphology, language
evolution and change, the grammatical analysis of spoken discourse,
and the teaching of grammar in schools.

I worked on the Survey project The
Changing Verb Phrase in Present-Day British English. In this
project we contributed to the emerging research area of 'recent
change' in syntax. We used data from the Diachronic Corpus of Present-Day
Spoken English (DCPSE)
to investigate morphosyntactic changes in the English verb phrase
from the 1960s to the 1990s.

I also worked on the Teaching
English Grammar in Schools project. Our team created a website
of materials for secondary English education, with a focus on the
grammatical structure of the language. In creating the materials,
we drew extensively on the rich resources of authentic English provided
by the Survey's computerised corpora.

Education

I completed a PhD on language evolution at the University of Reading
in 2008. Previously, I gained a BA in linguistics and an MA in applied
linguistics at the University of Queensland in Australia, where
I also worked as a Research Assistant on the Cambridge Grammar
of the English Language project team led by Professor Rodney
Huddleston.

Publications

Bowie, Jill (2008). Proto-discourse and the emergence of compositionality.
Interaction Studies 9(1), 18–33. (In special issue
of journal edited by Michael A. Arbib and Derek Bickerton, and republished
2010 in Benjamins Current Topics series as The emergence of
protolanguage: holophrasis vs compositionality. Amsterdam;
Philadelphia: Benjamins.)

Bowie, Jill, and Bas Aarts (2012). Change in the English infinitival
perfect construction. In: Terttu Nevalainen and Elizabeth Closs
Traugott (eds.) The Oxford handbook of the history of English,
pp. 200-210. Oxford; New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press.
»
Draft version of paper (PDF).